Newsletter #27: WAR! (in Reform UK, not with Russia — yet)

PLUS: Georgescu banned from Romanian elections

Good morning.

It’s WAR! In Reform UK that is, not with Russia — at least not yet (sorry, Tobias Ellwood). But first: an update from our Romania correspondent.

This newsletter’s agenda: Călin Georgescu banned from running in Romanian elections (free); WAR! (in Reform UK, not with Russia — yet) (paid); Thoughts on ‘Nigel Farage IS the Messiah’ in J’accuse (paid).

Călin Georgescu banned from running in Romanian elections

On 7 March, Elon Musk’s favourite Eastern European, Călin Georgescu, applied to run for President of Romania, in spite of being detained and indicted on February 27. Yesterday, he finally heard back: he’s been rejected. His supporters, mostly drawn out of two of the three main right-wing populist parties, AUR and POT (the other being the anti-Georgescu SOS), were clearly waiting in the wings to see what would happen once the Central Electoral Bureau (BEC) rejected his application.

They have now come out on the streets, joining up with hooligans from the FCSB (one of the two clubs claiming to be the ‘real’ Steaua Bucharest) vs. Universitatea Craiova match. This really livened things up. However, since this protest was a bit impromptu and emotions were running high, some people ended up resorting to chucking stone slabs they extracted from the pavement at the police — who, decked out in riot gear, were given permission to use tear gas. Horațiu Potra, the head of a Romanian mercenary company in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is now openly associating with Georgescu (despite Georgescu claiming not to know him, even though he has been photographed meeting with him in public), telling people to find whatever tools they can in their house and come out on the streets to protest. Unfortunately, since this is Romania and not America, most people ended up coming out with hammers and random gardening equipment they dug out of their attics and garden sheds, much tempering any sense that this would be ‘the second coming of the Romanian Revolution’, as they had hoped.

When Horațiu Potra first appeared on the scene in December, he seemed strange, but mostly irrelevant. He had made the news for allegedly putting a gang of mercenaries under Georgescu’s command. What Georgescu would use these men for was unclear, though (naturally) the press worked itself up into a frenzy over the news. It was after the police searched the homes of Potra and Georgescu’s bodyguards — where they found large amounts of cash, weapons, and ammunition — that Georgescu himself was indicted.

Additionally, from the investigations of Potra that followed, we now know of a potential link between Georgescu and a donor, Frank Timiș, an Australian-Romanian émigré. Timiș is himself an interesting character: twice convicted for heroin possession in Australia in the ’80s, in the ’90s, he somehow set up a series of mining and oil and gas companies, many of which were alleged to be fraudulent and/or corrupt. He briefly appeared in the news in Britain when in 2012, BP acquired one of these companies for billions. (It has been alleged that Timiș’ company bribed Senegalese officials in order to acquire exploitation rights; BP, whether knowingly or unknowingly, then benefited from this without having to do the dirty work itself.) It is unclear how much his net worth is today, though it is very likely to be well above $2bn. The specific link between Potra and Timiș is that Timiș paid Potra’s mercenary company to provide security for some of his mines in Africa. It is possible that Timiș may have secretly financed Georgescu in exchange for Georgescu reopening the gold mines at Rosia Montana (located in Alba County, Transylvania), though we must emphasise that this is not yet proven. It is entirely possible Timiș supported Georgescu simply because he politically agrees with him; after all, in 2010, Timiș funded the ‘Christian Party’ in Britain to the tune of £100,000.

However, in the end, this was not really even entirely necessary for rejecting Georgescu’s candidacy. What we know is that the BEC rejected Georgescu’s application because it decided to uphold the Constitutional Court’s (CCR) ruling on 6 December to rerun the presidential elections. It stated that Georgescu did not respect the ‘sacrosanct’ rules relating to electoral campaigns, i.e., failing to declare his funding, and that this gave rise to a breach of his ‘obligation to defend democracy’ (found in an expressis verbis in decision nr. 2 of the CCR on 5 October 2024). Other constitutional legal provisions that allow for the disqualification of a candidate for electoral fraud can be found in Article 147(4), Article 11, and Article 17 of the Romanian Constitution.

We can hardly say that we did not see this coming. But what is interesting is that most of the protesters were actually out on the streets for the wrong reason, believing that Georgescu’s candidacy was disallowed on the basis of a ‘formal’ error, as opposed to one of ‘substance’ (i.e., ‘forma’ versus ‘fond’).

This was because for about two hours, the whole country thought that Georgescu’s application was rejected purely because he had failed to complete an annex on the form that requires candidates to declare their personal income. There was a vote in BEC (which consists of party representatives and jurists) on Georgescu’s application. Ten people voted against allowing Georgescu to run, and four voted in favour. The four in favour were the representatives of the three right-wing populist parties (AUR, POT, and SOS) and the right-liberal party (USR). Then, after some discussion, it seems that it was found that Georgescu’s form wasn’t filled in properly. After a ten-minute break, something curious happened: the representatives of AUR and SOS now wanted to vote against Georgescu’s candidacy (which was a bit strange, given that he was being rejected anyway). It is unclear whether this is a sign of growing discontent in AUR and SOS with Georgescu.

Reading between the lines on these somewhat confusing events, then, we can say that Georgescu was — in effect — rejected on grounds of ‘substance’ (in a 10-4 vote) and also on the grounds of ‘form’ (in a 12-2 vote), though we should say that exactly how things transpired (let alone why) remains somewhat unclear. (It should be noted that this ‘substance’ and ‘form’ distinction is one that the Romanian media has attached considerable importance to. It should also be noted that the decision itself did not mention the clerical error.

But why did Georgescu give the BEC the opportunity to reject him on grounds of ‘form’, in a seemingly completely unnecessary (and obvious) error? The PSD-aligned, CNN-affiliated news channel Antena 3 has taken the view that Georgescu was attempting to bamboozle the BEC into rejecting his application only due to ‘form’, which is something that he can easily appeal and rectify on the basis of this being a clerical error. If the clerical error was resolved, then both the CCR and BEC would find it difficult not to let him run. They could only go back on this if they found a new reason, and they wouldn’t be able to bring up his electoral fraud a second time.

Alas, the BEC could not be tricked, officially choosing to reject his application on the basis of ‘substance’, which is much harder to contest. Georgescu will now have one week to contest the decision with the CCR — the same court that annulled the first round of the elections in December. Such a path thus seems almost certain to be fruitless.

As such, it looks like the end of the road for Georgescu. (To think that what was probably the final battle was fought with quaint juristic tricks!) But it will only be next week that we will be able to say for certain. In the meantime, Georgescu has taken to English-language X to complain that Romania is a ‘dictatorship’; that if Romania ‘falls’, so too will the rest of Europe. Nothing new under the sun, but at least it still keeps Elon Musk, and his equally idiotic performing monkey Mario Nawfal, entertained.

So what’s next? Applications for the upcoming presidential elections in May are still being submitted. So far, we have acceptances for the applications of Nicușor Dan, Elena Lasconi, and Crin Antonescu. Dan is the independent Mayor of Bucharest, and founder of the right-liberal USR, though he has now left the party due to disagreements over gay marriage. He thus represents the more conservative wing of Romania’s anti-system liberals. Lasconi, the Mayor of Câmpulung, who was originally set to face Georgescu in the second round, is USR’s candidate, and represents the more liberal wing of this political tendency. Antonescu of PNL is the pro-establishment candidate, backed by the current coalition government (namely, of the centrist PSD, centre-right PNL, the centre-right Hungarian interest party UDMR, and the other ethnic minority parties).

The current acting president, Ilie Bolojan of PNL (who replaced Klaus Iohannis, also of PNL, when he resigned on 12 February), has not yet submitted an application, despite much speculation. It is unclear where the votes of the right-wing populist parties will go to now that Georgescu has been banned from running, though AUR’s George Simion has said that he will run if Georgescu is prevented from doing so.

There is also every reason to fear the entrance of Victor Ponta, formerly of PSD, who consistently secures second or third place in most opinion polls, and who may well secure the support of many of Georgescu’s voters by leaning into a diluted form of ‘sovereigntism’. Ponta is nowhere near as bad as the ‘distributist’ Georgescu, but is a remnant of early ’10s Romania, a period in which our politics was extremely boring, dominated by rigmarole and personally-driven feuds rather than by actual ideology. His period as Prime Minister (2012-15) saw strong economic growth, but it is hard to tell whether this was due to anything Ponta himself did, given that Romania had just become a full member of the European Union and seemed primed for rapid catch-up growth. What we do know about Ponta is that he really wants to increase pensions — something which, given Romania’s demographic difficulties and large fiscal deficit, is obviously a very bad idea.

But after Georgescu, pretty much everything in Romanian politics feels like a non-story.

—Anonymous Contributor, Pimlico Journal